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dcblogs writes: "Southern California Edison is preparing to offshore IT jobs, the second major U.S. utility in the last year to do so. It will be cutting its staff, but it hasn't said by how much. The utility is using at least two offshore outsourcing firms, according to government records. SCE's management culture may be particularly primed for firing its IT workers. Following a workplace shooting in SCE's IT offices in 2011, the utility conducted an independent audit of its organizational and management culture. One observation in this report, which was completed a year later, was that 'employees perceive managers to be more concerned about how they 'look' from above, and less concerned about how they are viewed by their subordinates. This fosters an unhealthy culture and climate by sending a message to employees that it is more important to focus on how things look from the top than how they actually are down below.'"

If you are "offshoring" you are literally having the work performed off-shore. If they fear their jobs are getting replaced by H1-Bs, then they are "outsourcing". It would be illegal for them to fire everyone then hire H1-Bs, and even if the off-shore companies place people that all happen to be H1-B, lawsuits will follow. How can the consulting company say they couldn't find competent employees when they know a bunch that got laid-off?

It would be illegal for them to fire everyone then hire H1-Bs, and even if the off-shore companies place people that all happen to be H1-B, lawsuits will follow. How can the consulting company say they couldn't find competent employees when they know a bunch that got laid-off?

The article basically claims that with employees making 60K+, the rule of "cannot find competent employees" does not apply to H1-B, so they should be ok. Does anyone know more about this loophole that the article is talking about?

= U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE)= U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services - Fraud Detection and National Security Division (FDNS)= U.S. Department of Labor - Office of Inspector General= U.S. Postal Inspection Service (USPIS)= U.S. Department of State= U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of Iowa

Well there's an authority to base your response upon! I especially like the links to payday loans and making sure your H1B sponsor treats you properly. I missed the part where it actually backs up a single thing you assert since the press release it references is not linked.

According to the article, they are outsourcing the work to an offshore IT firm. This IT firm, in turn, will give the work to a US location, which staffs itself with H-1B workers. The effect is that US-based workers are being laid off and indirectly replaced with H-1Bs.

If you are a college graduate who has invested tens of thousands of dollars into education and is expecting a return on that investment, if some businessman can get those skills cheaper overseas, its just good business.

If you are some business who has invested tens of thousands of dollars developing some product and is expecting a return on that investment and someone can bypass that and simply download the work from an overseas server, that is copyright violation, viol

Its happens in a lot of US sectors from mil to computers to support.
You set up a 100% US based firm to lobby for and sign off on US work, all the US legal needs, US contracting, US academic. State/federal US requirements are met.
At the back end is massive complex reality of a 24/7 cost saving outsourcing/offshoring service.
A massive reduction in US costs, a massive flow of long term cash out of the US for decades services all via a 100% Made in the USA success story.

The problem is that the race to the bottom has began, and I doubt it will end until we hit it. If it is cheaper to pay someone else to do the job, be it in another state, another country, or simply to ship in the workers they are going to do it, and if they can't do it, they will try to move the job itself to that other country or other state. Heck if they are just moving jobs to other states they can just call it a reorg and not even get any bad press about it, even though the key purpose was to surplus all those pesky highly paid workers who had devoted much of their lives to a particular company. The guys in charge are betting they can improve the balance sheet while they are there, then get a nice bonus for it, and if it all falls apart later, well they are likely gone or retired by then, so its not their problem.

Sure you could setup sane rules to minimize it, but it is not easy, or at least the politicians make it more difficult than it needs to be. For instance, if the country that your buying all this stuff from has poor environmental laws, well then that country is basically not charging what is required to clean up their own mess, so the logical thing to do is to tarrif it in a measured way so at least society can somewhat deal with the mess later, or at the very least make the playing field a touch more level. At any rate, the reason the United States can't compete with manufacturing/labor/etc is as much as anything about the unlevel playing field. We find rules about safe working conditions and pollution to be a good thing, but hapilly ignore that others are less concerned with such things if we can buy a $200 television.

The other common thing about jobs these days is companies have little loyalty to their employees, so of course their employees have little loyalty to the company either. This leads to companies always asking for employees that are tailor fit for a very obscure job, which of course they often can't find, since that job may be brand new and short term. So the company does a token search, fails to find the non existent expert on widget series 12 when combined with gear series 13 and 20 years experience with the new fad computer language that has only been out five, and of course concludes that it is H-1B time. Sure the employee may be even less skilled than those that were actually available, but hey he or she is cheap and leashed directly to the company of interest so they will spend some effort training him or her. Perhaps in the end they saved no actual money due to all the project delays, but they did save money on paper initially, and that is what is most important.

Yes, let's base compensation on seniority rather than merit or anything related to real-world performance, and make it impossible to fire someone for anything short of mass murder. Then let's take a chunk of each worker's paycheck against their will and give it to the goddamn politicians to fund their campaigns. Yep, that sounds like exactly what the tech sector needs.

The destruction of the worker-employer bond even longer - back in the 1980s.

Tarrifs weren't primarily about environmental responsibility, although indirectly they worked in that direction by favoring local production with its more stringent environmental regulations. But Free Trade has pretty much killed that.

1950's Republicans would probably die of apoplexy. We gave Most Favored trade status to one of the world's biggest Communist countries.

I suspect this is because the Democrats get most of the tech (Google, Microsoft, etc.) donations. But just because you're socially liberally (presumably, given your post and bias) doesn't mean you have to believe the Democrats never do wrong. Everybody does wrong

Nevertheless CA is primarily a blue state. I'm not sticking up for the R's here - just pointing out that with many issues the D's are also busy screwing Americans. The D's whore for money too, and much of theirs comes from the tech industry. One of the few people in congress to oppose some of this H-1B crap is Chuck Grassley, who's an R.

How do you know the managers aren't ALREADY from India? That was the case a couple of jobs ago for me, it was not exactly reassuring to hear from the high-level manager who was pushing for and managing the outsourcing, who happened to be Indian, that "these (offshore) people are not replacing any jobs in the US". It was completely false, of course, unless he meant that the six-month gap between each round of mass company-wide layoffs and adding more staffing to the offshore/outsource location were somehow d

I should also say that, predictably, the Indian workers for the contract companies tended to rarely stay in their jobs longer than a year, so quality tended to be poor and training was a constant battle. And with a 15%+ pay increase every year (vs 2-3% in the US, in the few years they actually gave any pay increases at all), they were going to catch up eventually. But even at the time, other managers admitted privately that management and other costs ate up the difference and they weren't actually saving an

Has anyone, anywhere, seen an instance where a move like this actually works out well? I sure haven't. Communication issues, poor worker training and expertise, high turnover. The 'savings' look good on paper, but in the end it's a disaster.

Re Has anyone, anywhere, seen an instance where a move like this actually works out well?
Think of the banana republic model and the way the USA looked after South and Central America over many decades.
Experts arrived, products and services where imported, the raw materials where exported and local wages kept down.
Shareholders in the US got to enjoy generational wealth and their `"trust" funds grew.
The system works great, you just have to adjust to the role of seasonal shanty town worker or at best an

Re Has anyone, anywhere, seen an instance where a move like this actually works out well?

Yes. A government department near me fired everyone to be immediately hired by the contracting company they outsourced to, work was not disrupted, the contracting company made a mint, and they were so happy with it that they gave very expensive gifts to the people in government that signed off on it. So it worked out well for some.The taxpayers funding it out course are screwed and the employees transferred over effec

'employees perceive managers to be more concerned about how they 'look' from above, and less concerned about how they are viewed by their subordinates. This fosters an unhealthy culture and climate by sending a message to employees that it is more important to focus on how things look from the top than how they actually are down below.'

You don't need to commission an expensive report to find out stuff like this. It's so universal it's seen everywhere.

I think it'd help to mention that temporary means 3-6 years, and that losing your job means losing your legal immigration status in the US. It's also very difficult for H-1B's to change jobs. They're wonderfully captive labor.

It's also worth mentioning that they are paid a lot more here than wherever they come from. And they are going to work in IT either way. If we don't bring them here, they are going to compete with us from abroad, pay taxes abroad, work cheaper, and help build competing industries elsewhere.

Furthermore, it is not that difficult for H-1B's to change jobs or get green cards these days, and many of them immigrate. Conversely, for employment based immigration, almost everybody starts off as an H-1B, so killing o

I think it'd help to mention that temporary means 3-6 years, and that losing your job means losing your legal immigration status in the US. It's also very difficult for H-1B's to change jobs. They're wonderfully captive labor.

H1Bs are not temporary visa. They are visa meant for immigration and has a path leading to a green card. The only problem is that getting the green card for Indian and Chinese nationals is hard because 95% of H1B applicants are from India and China and the US has a 9% limit on the number of immigrants granted from one single country. If you are from say a country like England, you can get H1B to green card under 1 year. India and China can be as long as 5-10 years.

If your job pays you a decent living there is some chance it could be outsourced, generally across a border, to save the company from having to provide you and yours that extravagant middle class existence. The Acronym for this phenomenon = H-1B

So it's local outsourcing. They're still taking away your job so that they can give it to someone that isn't in as good of a bargaining position. It doesn't matter if it's some guy in a 3rd world country, or some guy that's visiting from a 3rd world country who gets to be treated like dirt.

Both "illegals" and H1-B's fall into this sort of 3rd world underclass.

"Lieber Kinder statt Inder!" means, Rather children instead of Indians! Which meant that the government should pay more attention to social programs encouraging working women to have children, and investing more in tech training for German students . . . instead of importing (cheap) foreign talent.

Of course, the whole plan was a ruse by companies who wanted to drive down the wages of

Manufacturing may be, but what about manufacturing EMPLOYMENT? When you use robots and automation, there aren't so many employees.

And it may look large because US manufacturing is focused on large-ticket items, like aircraft and rockets and tanks. It's still the case that 99% of the routine goods that you buy (whether clothes or household items or toys or electronics) are made in China.

Under no circumstances should any Utility in the US be allowed to Off-Shore IT operations of it's Infrastructure to Foreign Entities -- doing so opens up the possibility of access being given to enemies of the US or US-based interests by employees of the IT company or by the IT company itself if it comes under the influence or control of enemies of the US.

The ability to fuck with the infrastructure providing power to all of Southern California is a capability no one should be able to hand over to foreign nationals. The Federal Government needs to shove their foot right up the collective asses of Cal Eds Senior Management and Board.

" Under no circumstances should any Utility in the US be allowed to Off-Shore IT operations"

They aren't. I know this from first-hand experience as a Sr Engineer for a major phone company, that is to remain nameless. I was responsible for the audit, after the DoJ specifically told us we needed to ensure anybody who wan't *physically* in the US at the time, would not have access to ANY production data.

Despite the idiotic headline, this has to be about H1Bs who reside in the US, NOT off-shoring. The Fed wou

Organization (via Unions) is the only solution I can think of to this. Sure, we could call it something else, but it's basically Unions.

Un-Organized workers are too weak to demand or get better wages or a better way of life. Life basically stunk for everyone but a few kings thousands of years. It still stinks if you're not in one of the countries with a strong, well organized pool of labor that has solidarity. Sure, a few on/. might "Got Mine, FU" right now. But the powers that be are coming for you too....

You can force companies to pay higher wages, but you can't force them to exist. If they can't compete with overseas manufacturers at those higher wages, they are going to go out of business. And that's the reason companies outsource in the first place and why some key industries have disappeared from the US. So, high labor costs are the reason jobs are moving overseas, even to Europe; US wages are some of the highest in the world, and the only way we can pay those wages is by focusing on highly productive

A union's goal is to improve working conditions and remuneration is one of them.
Increasing the number of jobs and their quality are fundamental to the success of the union, both in the eyes of their members and of the employers.

At times a union runs into an unresponsive employer who sabotages the balance between work and rewards, just like that employer they can sabotage the company until it sees the light.

Unions require the leverage of work stoppage causing production blockage, but this doesn't work when the employer can pick up shop and move to cheaper labor. Combine this with the lack of import tariffs and there is no leverage for a labor union to wield. For unions to work now, you'd have to have the workers of the world unite, which was a Socialist rallying call if I remember my history. We all know what Americans think of Socialism, especially the sneering libertarians found in IT departments.

They bought an oil-company spin-off called Shell Solar. In their Washington (state) site, the Machinists' Union decided that it would be a great time to ask for a raise, since things had been stagnant there for awhile wage-wise. The company said no. The Union threatened to strike, and it made a bit of noise in t [oregonlive.com]

That would be completely different things with very different consequences. H-1B is a Visa to work in US, so jobs would not be offshored, just outsourced to a contractor (article mentions Infosys). Employees will be still paying taxes, and salaries can not be that low as they incur living expenses similar to US citizens. Added difficulty of changing jobs while on a visa does depress wages to some degree, but IT workers generally expect to live well.

Offshoring of course means no tax revenue for US and much lower living standards and expenses, so low salaries that US residents can not accept without starving.

It's unfortunate that the article doesn't make clear exactly what is happening.

SCE's management culture may be particularly primed for firing its IT workers...One observation in this report...was that 'employees perceive managers to be more concerned about how they 'look' from above, and less concerned about how they are viewed by their subordinates.

PHB1: "This survey shows our employees think we in management are clueless superficial jerks. What do we do about it?"

PHB2: "I got it! Fire them all and outsource their work to new people who don't yet know we are clueless superficial jerks."

You want to hire an H1-B. You then write a description for the visa that can only be filled by the prospective applicants (must speak Mandarin and Portuguese, code COBOL, have a C++ degree and play good lacrosse) You advertise. Many poor saps, thinking it might be a real job, apply. None of them fit your cookie cutter description. (or, want to work for the offered salary). You get visa.
The visa lives or dies at the employers' whim. Gives a whole new area of control over the employee....
I'm amazed.

First, one of Target's HVAC guy lost an ID. BUT, target has NOT found that the ID was used to get in there and that was the entry point.

Yet, the one thing that amazes me, is that they totally ignore the fact that not only did Target offshore a great deal, but esp. their production was offshored. And this was the group that is paying their Indian software engineers, about $7-9K/year (India, like china, plays games with their money against the dollar). How easy is it to offer somebody say 70K to simply open a port, or to leave a back door, etc, and NOT have it be found? Keep in mind that $70K in India, with the current rupee money, is a 10 year salary. You can quietly leave target, get another job elsewhere and have your retirement fully taken care of.
Yes, one group said that something was going on, but the group in India that was dealing with Production IGNORED IT. More importantly, the idiots in target that offshored this, were the ones that ignored the warnings.

And now, utilities are being stupid and following suite. It is time for shareholders to SUE the day lights out of Target and companies like this that offshore.

> This fosters an unhealthy culture and climate by sending a message to employees that it is more important to focus on how things look from the top than how they actually are down below.

In what world is outsourcing not the same culture in spades? Specifically, a few suits and a few lucky fourth or fifth level professionals selling the idea that a bunch of farmers with three hours of training can take over IT? This only works when the people making the decisions have a fundamental misunderstanding of the problem they're trying to solve.

As if Californians didn't have enough power problems... I'm glad I don't live there.

The U.S. economy is still in recovery and unemployment is still high. It's bad enough that we're importing workers for any reason, but to actually fire employees so you can import cheaper workers? What the actual FUCK!? It's pitchfork/scythe/burning torch time, I think; it's time for a little insurrection. U.S. companies need to be hiring U.S. citizens, damnit!

Free trade is great if you're a rich capitalist (e.g. someone that makes their living by owning capital). What about the rest of us? There's plenty of evidence to show NAFTA has been a disaster for everyone on both sides of the boarder except a few wealthy factory owners. Google a little and you won't find much to encourage you.

Karl Marx predicted that capital flowing to where labor was cheapest would result in a race to the bottom, but all anyone can remember about him is that a couple famous dictators

doesn't raise all ships, it swamps all but the biggest boats. Also, how does that help you, living a middle class life in a first world country. It's OK to think about yourself and your long term well being, You know?

A rising tide doesn't raise all ships, it swamps all but the biggest boats.

At least you've vaguely heard of the saying. The real saying is "A rising tide raises all boats". It basically sums up the general outcome of positive sum games. It amazes me how many people just don't get what a positive sum game is.

And the great irony here is that the largest ships, the developed world countries, are the ones being swamped. That's because they choose not to adapt. It's easier to blame the consequences of actions on the rich or whatever and just keep doing the same stupid things you dec

There are winners and losers. I don't mean to be callous towards the losers, but the baseball analogy stands. Integration of the negro league with the white league cost a lot of white and black baseball players their jobs in the short run, and most of the anger at the integration was from players that couldn't compete.

And sorry but what are you talking about with NAFTA? With the exception of the drug economy (which is by no means free and transparent trade), Mexico has made tremendous progress since 19

Free trade works well on a level playing field. Factories that process their waste cannot compete with those that dump waste in rivers and smog rest into the air. Workers in free countries cannot compete with slave labour in the overpopulated third world, where 50% of engineers sit unemployed, while the "lucky" ones commit suicides on a regular basis.

Let's be honest here... you want to work 8am - 5pm with an hour lunch, get paid over $60k a year (more in higher standard states), get bonuses and have a nice cushy job? That's absurd.

Absurd? It describes my current work situation closely. Well, if you exclude the pay and hours; my pay is in the ballpark of yours, and my hours aren't as rigid as "8-5 with an hour lunch". Still, there's always something better and always something worse. It's important to be able to find satisfaction in whatever job you're doing, and you seem to have done that just fine.

Yea, when you're a bit older, and have grown that money to a nice nest egg so that you don't need to work ever (at least till the economy crashes again), then you can say that you've won that particular game